Monday, June 03, 2013

A story with some Morels.

Mazy and I spent a couple hours exploring in the big woods on Sunday. Mazy was able to find a stinky patch of decaying muck to roll in but was unable to detect a big young buck sitting down watching us walk by. Terrible pic I know but the deer seemed so comfortable I didn't want to get closer and make him get up from what was likely his sleep time.

Above is a pic of the woods. About 300 yards per side. I think I may need an App or to figure out my google maps/google earth settings better to mark with GPS the big maple trees I find but maybe not. The dot above is from a pic of a tree I took with the location option on my phone camera turned on. So if I want to know where a tree is I look at the pic and then hit show on map. Seems to work but sometimes it goes to a location near by rather than the exact spot.

I really want it to work so I can come back to the 4 or so spots I found morels. At this point I would not have a clue how to find them again.

I tried to teach Mazy to find the morels for me but failed. I bet with some treat rewards I could get her to be a shrooming dog. Or maybe she would prefer to just roll in stinky crap.

Great quality morels. No cleaning necessary. Just some salt, pepper and butter. If it looks like a morel and has a hollow stem you can be pretty confident it is a morel and not poisonous.

So good. I have some left that I am thinking of making a homemade morel ravioli with them but need some filler ideas to go with the morels inside the ravioli. A cheese that is mild enough to not over power the mushroom perhaps.

Even with my mushroom book I find that confidently identifying mushrooms other than morels is surprisingly difficult.

Three Maples to remember. The foreground one has a big arm torn off. Behind it is the arm wrestler and if you could see through the trees the tree below that looks like it has a lazy arm is just a bit further. After that is the rhinoceros looking tree (not a maple). To get to this set go in a third of the way from the south west corner to the rhino tree or lazy arm.